Command Team Part II
Posted on Tue Jul 22nd, 2025 @ 5:25pm by Captain Edmund Merrick & Sergeant Audie Fitch & Warrant Officer Mercy Ryan & Sergeant Andrew Shy
Edited on on Tue Jul 22nd, 2025 @ 6:40pm
1,570 words; about a 8 minute read
Mission:
Episode 16 - Silent Cries
Location: Wren IX Underground City
Timeline: MD010 0900
Edmund looked at Neil giving a nod, his eyes flicking over to where Jayna was, "Charlie Mike, Colonel, Jayna, see you when I see you." he turned back to his path, leading his team to the next part.
Switching to a direct channel, he said, "Jayna, on me. We'll only engage targets that get in our way directly" As the began sprinting at roughly sixty kph, Neil grinned. "Is this a date night or what?"
"A date with you is never dull," she quipped as she sprinted after him. "But you owe me dinner after this."
Neil quickly ordered Rommie to update his waypoints and cycled back to the terrain map and began moving. They zig zagged away from where Ed's team was was moving through the clouds of flying bugs.
With the flanking teams going on their own paths, the path in front of the command team took a curve to the right leading them out to a small bridge leading to what looked like an underground city. A small portion of it anyway, seeing buildings being two stories tall, flanking the stone road that went down the center. It looked clear for the moment, no signs of bugs after them being cleared from the tunnel. The roof of the cavern loomed above the buildings, all was still, too still which worried Edmund.
Then a warning came from Edmund's hud, there wasn't anything from the ground but something in the air. "Look sharp! looks like some of these bugs fly!" Then there was the sound of buzzing in the air, as bugs around the size of a cat coming towards the team with stingers like that of a wasp.
Seeing the flying bugs, Mercy switched back to 'Ruby' and began firing on the bugs.
One fell from the air, its body curling up as it died.
Keeping the spider drones climbing through on prescribed routes, Andrew kept them on AI control, jumping from one to the other to monitor their firing as his suit moved under it's own prescribed route. He was just switching out of Drone 2-18 when another cloud of the flying bugs fell from the darkened ceiling, swarming their left. He cycled back into the drone, taking local control and shifted the phasers into burst fire. He also popped off four micro torpedo's set for air bursts. That cleared the latest cloud and he reset and jumped out of the drone and back into his just in time to experience a rain of bug parts.
Grinning, he looked over at Audie who was also getting a shower and said over the team channel, "Going to be fun cleaning the goo later."
"Oh, hell no!" Audie spat, ducking the debris, although, with the suit, there was no need. She was no fan of flying things in the first place, but an unknown bogie that was trying to kill you was over the top! "At least they won't be getting up my nose," she quipped, glad for the new use for the suit!
A new sound registered over Andrew's, pickups and his eyes widened as blips filled his sensor screen, "We've got incoming he called out, auto-tasking the drones to independent control with specific fields of overlapping fire. He'd just hit the ENGAGE button, when he looked up to see a herd of bugs trampling at them, some already past the drone line. His phaser carbine came up and he began laying down fire and edging back slightly to cover his zone.
Mercy was still playing anti-air gun, as the carcasses of the the once airborne insects piled up around her.
Seeing that a new horde were converging on Shy, Mercy heaved a cluster of grenades at them. This caused viscera to coat the walls of the cave and her fellow Marines.
Yet another reason to be grateful for the suits...they were good protection against bug goo! Swiping quickly at the face shield to clear her vision, Audie took aim at strays that were getting past the other defenses. She was likely going to have unpleasant dreams about this later!
>>>"All FLEET and CURE Elements. Be advised. This Species is the same as the Malificus entity. Be mindful of our previous experiences and watch each other's back. Tremble out."<<<
Edmund was tracking the movements of the bugs both in the air and now on the ground, which were coming in droves, the message from Tremble caused him concern as well. "Heads up the species we are dealing with, are like an entity named Malificus, they feed off of negative emotions and the type of negative emotions vary."
The bug goo that rained down upon the small group, Edmund knew it was going to be a mess to clean off the armor. The feed from Shy's drones also fed images of the area. Edmund looked at the images.It looked like the road stopped being a straight main road and became more of a 'Y' shape where the road split off to the right and to the left. This did make for a bottle neck which would help be a good place to kill the bugs that were funneling their way. From the look of things, there were less bugs coming from the right than the left.
"We need to block the path to the left, to stave off the onslaught of the bugs and go to the right." Edmund called saying this as he blasted a few more bugs moving forward. When they got to the point to where they could see the buildings in question. "Lets bring part of those buildings down."
Audie didn't have the fire-power to bring down any buildings, but she could at least stave off some of the onslaught from the bugs. "Negative emotions?" she muttered, thinking through that her current emotions ran the gamut from disgust to fear to panic, all that she was controlling. But really, if she could find a way to override some of those...
"Ha!" she exclaimed, grinning, "it's like one of those old amusement park shooting galleries!" Maybe, if she could find the fun in shooting ooey-gooey bugs, it would help!
"Take that, fiend!"
Edmund looked at his system listing of what he had loaded the night before, there, just what he had put in, photon mortar shells. That had the capacity to take down part the building, he hoped and block the path of the bugs. "firing photon mortars!" he called out aiming for the building on the left to block the bugs path. The two shells went flying out, hitting their target, part of the building crashing down upon the bugs dust and debris kicking up. and blocking the path for the moment.
"Move, move!!" Edmund shouted "Head to the right!" following his own command, the armor lending speed to his run. "Shy plot out a path we need to go to!"
Andrew had the waypoints loaded and shared them out over the localized net and picked up his pace to maintain his role as point, the remaining drones dialed back to support roles on semi-independent control. A lot of data was pouring in and he needed to attend to the business at hand.
Right now killing bugs was his business.
And business was good.
Keying the Team frequency, Andrew said, "Intercept way-pointed. We should rendezvous with the Fleet in maybe eight minutes. The net's kinda dicey." He had his twin pistols out now, working in rapid fire mode since the range was definitely danger close. "Need to move it Captain," he yelled unconsciously as he was nearly bull rushed by a pair of the black chiton armored bugs. He blew the first one apart and chopped at the second with the halfmoon blade mounted between the trigger and barrel.
The blade bounced slightly the bugs pincer like beak gripped chopped into his armored forearm, creasing it. Damage readouts began to scroll on his screen.
A shot of compressed energy impacted the beetle, causing it to explode over the wall of the cavern.
"You owe me one, Shy." Mercy said over the comms.
"I do hate things flying at my face," Audie mumbled to herself as she tried to keep her concentration and focus on individual targets, no easy feat, what with all the Yuckies coming at them in unending droves. But she knew her limitations, and that was one target at a time...
Till that target drops right on top of you.
A Joint Post By
Captain Edmund Merrick
Company Commanding Officer Officer, The Cure
USS Pioneer
Sergeant Audie Fitch
Corpsman Team 2, The Cure
USS Pioneer
Sergeant Andrew Shy
Tactical Systems Operator, Team 2, The Cure
USS Pioneer
Warrant Officer Mercy Ryan
Sniper, Team 1, The Cure
USS Pioneer
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